Daimler AG Migrates its Mission Critical Servers to Suse Linux

SUSE technologies are helping Daimler AG, the German automotive behemoth, to migrate a large proportion of its mission-critical servers from proprietary UNIX operating systems to 'the open and flexible Linux platform'.

Daimler AG: Automotive Giant Latest to Adopt Linux

Daimler AG joins a long list of companies and even cities that have joined the open source bandwagon. SUSE technologies, being one of the earliest providers of Enterprise Linux solutions, helped Daimler AG to migrate a large proportion of its mission-critical servers from proprietary systems to Linux platform, specifically to SUSE Linux. This is a major win for the proponents of enterprise level solutions based on Linux and open-source.

Historically, Daimler AG used a number of proprietary UNIX distributions for the task. But managing multiple environments increased costs and required the company to maintain different skill sets to accomplish very similar tasks on different platforms. This is where SUSE technologies pitched in with their Linux Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

"A key target for the new project was to
migrate away from UNIX on proprietary
hardware towards Linux on commodity
x86 servers. The objective was to standardize
on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
as a single distribution of Linux wherever
practical. The openness and ease of
customization of SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server, as well as its closeness to UNIX,
made it the ideal starting point for this
virtual platform concept."

Initially, the company deployed SUSE Manager
with 28 distributed SUSE Manager proxy
servers for comprehensive Linux lifecycle
management. As part
of the migration process, SUSE Manager
builds a tailored image with the requested
packages and features. These operating system images may include
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions
with 24x7 Priority Support, a
disaster-recovery tool, the SUSE Manager
client and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
for SAP Applications with the SUSE Linux
Enterprise High Availability Extension.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE
Manager eventually helped Daimler AG to
successfully migrate a large proportion of
its mission-critical workloads from proprietary UNIX platforms to Linux. The company has cut the number
of UNIX instances by 40 percent, as it
moves crucial applications to SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server.

"The success of the transition to the SUSE
platform is reflected in the growth of the
company’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
landscape. In the last few years, the number
of Linux instances has increased by a
factor of four. This considerable expansion
demonstrates both the successful ongoing
project to migrate UNIX applications
to Linux and the organic growth in the
company’s web applications where SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server has become the
preferred platform."